The next phase in the Web Site Development Life Cycle is designing the site. This deals with the overall planning and roughing out of the site. In this phase the site design must be approved by the site's owners before any actual coding is done.

Material Checklist
     First up, gather the materials necessary for designing, as well as administering the site, such as pencils, graph paper, HTML editing software, image editors, browsers, web site validators and analyzers, and web promotion tools, flowcharting programs, etc. Make a checklist if you have to, that way you don't waste time getting stuck somewhere on down the line. Also, have all the data you gathered in the first phase close at hand.

The Layout of the Site
     There are several ways to go about designing the site layout. A primitive, yet effective, way is to rough them out on paper. Yes, there's still is purpose for paper. By laying out the pages on graph paper you can get a good idea of the site's structure. Making a flowchart-like-layout is also quite useful. It allows you to view the site as a whole and see any structural problems. Below is an example of a very small, web site layout in flowchart form.

     Of course a diagram of a real web site would be much more in-depth than this one. There's really no standard way to use flowchart shapes in web site design. Above we used squares to represent the nodes or pages in the site. For site downloads and e-mails, or input and output, we used parallelograms. For CGI, scripting and any other kind of programming, we used the decision diamond and a processing circle. You can do it some other way if you'd like but just make sure it's understandable.

     Next you would begin roughing out the actual content of the web pages. You may find yourself going back and forth between this and the overall layout design in order to make everything work well. You would be laying out where information goes and how it looks as well as positioning images, charts, graphs, etc. You should have a good idea of the structure before you do any coding so make sure the layouts are thorough.

The Look of the Site
     During the design of the site, you should keep in mind the overall look of the site should reflect in favor of the company. Since the Internet is a new kind of medium, you'll have to blend the company's image to fit into the World Wide Web. Image isn't everything, but it's the key ingredient in getting somebody's attention. So you'll have to use the company's image and blend it with what Internet users would consider pleasing.

     After all this work, you present this design to the ones in charge, and if they approve it, you can start the actual creation of the site. In the next section, we'll talk about coding, testing, and advertising the site.

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Web Site Development Life Cycle

Phase 1: Data Hoarding
Phase 2: Site Design
Phase 3: Going Live
Phase 4: Site Maintenance